The discographies published on my "American Music" pages are a non-commercial labor-of-love
and in no way associated with any business firm.

All I know about the resp. artist's / label's musical output is shown here.
To purchase out-of-print records I recommend an ebay, discogs or google search.

And - sorry for that - I have not the time to answer any e-mails asking me about further information,
let alone duplicating out-of-print recordings I happen to own.

Stefan Wirz

Please feel free to complete, to correct or to comment my writings

Michael Kleff: American Music
Handgemachte Label- und Musikerdiskografien



source: "Folker" Nr.1/2014, S. 38

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... here's a (rough) translation into English via Google Translate:

Treasure trove on the Internet
AMERICAN MUSIC
Handmade label and music discographies
Text: Michael Kleff

At fourteen, "in the pre-blues phase," he bought his first record: The Kinks, "You Really Got Me." That was in 1964. Three years later, Stefan Wirz acquired his first Blues LP, an album by the James Cotton Blues Band. He grew up with jazz, blues and gospel. Already in the early fifties, Miles Davis, Chris Barber, Lonnie Donegan, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Lightnin 'Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, Odetta, The Sensational Nightingales and many others were permanently on the turntable in their living room. Twenty years later, "American Music" became the site that regularly attracts thousands of music lovers from all over the world looking for information on blues music in particular.

Stefan Wirz is a landscape architect. In the late 1980s, following the trend of the time, he set up a website for his office. When this website was on the net - "tinkered with own newly acquired HTML skills" - he suddenly had far too much space for his office presentation. "What could be more appropriate than to attach a more private part?", Wirz recalls. It was at the beginning of a "certain annoyance" about the fact that there was little information about his esteemed guitarist Steve Mann, whom he knew from the Blue Goose LP 'Elephant Songs & Cow Cow Blues'. The first discography was therefore dedicated to the label Blue Goose. "From there it developed so that I always added something when in my opinion something was missing and it was fun to supplement it," says Stefan Wirz. Meanwhile, his collection has grown to about one hundred and twenty label and about four hundred music discographies. He never counted the number of documented albums. "Unfortunately, I can not simply leave that to my computer, because my pages are not produced with a clever database system, but exclusively by hand."

'LUST AND LAUNE' [at a whim] AS SELECTION CRITERIA
"Nach Lust und Laune", i.e. sometimes musicians who have published a lot ("because of the challenge"), sometimes musicians with very few recordings ("gap fillers, if something should be done quickly"), Wirz defines as selection criteria. The fact that blues, folk, cajun and gospel are preferred has to do with Stefan Wirz's preferences. "One should not despise feelings," he says. He still likes to listen to the blues. "However, not only African-American musicians," which is why he has lately also added many white musicians.
Where does Stefan Wirz find his information? "During my lifetime I have always subscribed to at least one, sometimes even several music, especially blues magazines," is his answer. Whereby he admits that "Folker" is not among them - "Because it contains too many music beyond my focus". In addition, there are a lot of books, including of course the relevant discographies, "so that I - besides permanent googling - can fall back on much printed material." If he has found a new 'theme', he first evaluates the relevant "Bibles", "but each of those only contains bare data and documents only a certain period of time - the blues for example 1890-1943, 1943-1970, 1971-2000". If this is exploited as the basic framework, the "illustration" is done using the scanner and the Internet. Many of the cover images Wirz digitized from his own extensive record collection. For further search, it goes to the Internet. For what he thinks is still missing, Wirz asks the "dear colleagues" in Internet forums.

COMPLETENESS WOULD BE FINE, BUT ...
During the day, Stefan Wirz thinks about landscape planning, and at night he sits in front of the computer with a pack of cigarettes and a pot of coffee to pursue his "hobby"? "No, no," he averts, "I've never smoked anything in my life and I've hardly had any coffee for decades." However, Wirz drinks a lot of tea with his work - after all, he has English ancestors. He'll be sixty-five this March [That was five years ago!]. "As a soon-to-retiree, I now have all the time in the world for my hobby, with upcoming senile bed escape even in the middle of the night!" For the same reason, his huge record collection is currently decreasing rapidly through sales, "because I feel the urge at my demise not to leave my daughters a mess of things that would only burden them". Completeness would be nice, but "to fully document all blues musicians, someone would probably have to spend a few extra lives," says Stefan Wirz.
For those musicians who are included in his internet presence, however, he strives for completeness in the documentation of their work and is accordingly pleased every time "wie ein Schneekönig" [tickled pink], if well meaning people make him aware of something that he had overlooked until then. And they come from all over the world. Often, his "visitors" also leave comments to thank for finding something that they have been looking for, sometimes for years. "And if they additionally do push the 'donate' button to send a small donation, that does not bother me at all."